The beta of Microsoft BizTalk Server 2006 Release 2 is upgrading support for RFID and EDI. And, not surprisingly, it's adding support for the latest Microsoft platforms, including Windows Vista and Office 2007.
The highlight is RFID support. That's been a challenge for most servers because of the need to handle or filter huge volumes of data that would spew from these devices. And because these capabilities aren't cheap, developing them has been something of a chicken and egg question: demand for RFID has yet to hit critical mass, yet to spur market growth, middleware providers must invest in significant R&D.

BizTalk's approach is based on adapting the kind of plug-and-play technology used for connecting computing peripherals such as printers to RFID. Microsoft has built a device interface, to which device manufacturers design the drivers.

Developing the driver layer was child's play compared to the next piece: developing an event processing services that applies logic and rules to filtering huge torrents of data. Microsoft claims its RFID event engine is lightweight enough so it won't add too much computing load. It allows filtering to occur in layers, at BizTalk Server, or if the device or device aggregators are smart enough, to share some of the filtering there as well.

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